Comment by xattt
13 hours ago
As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages.
A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.
Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...
It helps that Latin has the word pomus for fruit.
Wait 'till you hear about melon - "μήλον" i.e. "apple" in Greek.
Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.
I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.
Wow, апельсин - apelsin(Russian) makes total sense now
Potatoes are called "earth apples" in french (pomme de terre) and a bunch of other european languages
Thank you for this. Knowing both those words, i could never work out the original/history of the terms.
>A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples
don't know if it makes the point or upends it, but the fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn't specifically an apple.